FERC Grants MVP Request to Extend Deadline to October 2026
The 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project from Wetzel County, WV, to Pittsylvania County, VA, announced in 2014, was supposed to be completed in 2018 and cost $3.5 billion. The project builder, Equitrans Midstream, now says MVP, which is 94% complete, should be done by the end of 2023 at a staggering cost of $6.6 billion. What happened between 2014 and today is that Big Green groups, many of which use foreign funding (from countries like Russia), have repeatedly challenged the project. Complicit and colluding judges have placed roadblocks in the way, preventing MVP from finishing. Given the ongoing opposition from the radical left, MVP asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in June to extend the time to complete the project until October 2026, just in case. On Tuesday, FERC granted MVP’s request.
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New York State’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, and Attorney General, Letitia James, issued virtually the same press release yesterday to announce they’ve killed yet another small business in New York State. In an amusing display of vanity, Hochul and James (both Democrats and political rivals, James wants Hochul’s position as Governor) issued slightly different versions of the same press release, each putting her own name first in the release. The release says James R. Lee and his corporate affiliates–Lee Oil Company, Inc., Whitesville Producing Corporation, Whitesville Production Corp., Allegro Oil & Gas Inc., and Allegro Investments Corporation–owned or operated hundreds of oil wells in Steuben and Cattaraugus counties. A state lawsuit claimed some 400 of those wells were not properly plugged. The state won a $2 million judgment against Lee and his companies for lack of compliance, the biggest such award in state history related to plugging old wells.
Talk about irony! Scared of the potential impacts of the coronavirus and with the price of oil crashing in March 2020 (just as COVID was getting started), Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of a 50/50 joint venture partnership with Energy Transfer (ET) to build a new LNG export facility in Lake Charles, Louisiana (see 
The same old issue keeps returning in Pennsylvania for landowners and rights owners. The Pennsylvania Minimum Royalty Act guarantees payments to all rights owners of at least 12.5% of the value of the produced gas. Yet contracts signed by many landowners allow for post-production deductions, and those deductions sometimes (often?) result in landowners receiving less than 12.5% in royalty payments. This issue has been a thorn of contention between landowners and drillers for years–two groups that are normally allies. Farmers/landowners from several western PA counties gathered yesterday at the Washington County Farm Bureau’s annual legislative meeting to discuss, among other issues, minimum royalties.
In April 2021, MDN brought you the news that Chesapeake Energy, after buying Eagle Ford oil assets in 2018 for $4 billion (during the reign of Doug Lawler), was looking to unload those assets for around $2 billion (see 
Here’s something you won’t hear about or read in the Big Legacy Media…A group of 1,100 scientists and policy experts from around the world has joined together to establish a new group called Climate Intelligence (
NATIONAL: Carbon capture and storage: will it work this time?; INTERNATIONAL: EU gas market passes 2 important milestones; Global LNG investments to peak at $42 billion in 2024; Onshore drilling rig use to increase over the next five years; Norway has overtaken Russia as Europe’s biggest supplier of natural gas; Russia’s gas threat is a bluff.
In January 2020, the retirement systems for public employees of various municipalities, including the Allegheny County (PA) Employees’ Retirement System, filed a lawsuit against Energy Transfer and subsidiary Sunoco Logistics alleging top management made false and misleading statements about the construction of three Mariner East 2 and the Revolution natural gas pipeline projects in Pennsylvania. The lawsuit alleges because of those statements, the share price of their stock fell, and investors lost a boatload of money. In April 2021, the lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss by Energy Transfer (see 
Just when you thought you’d seen it all from the Communist left in this country (i.e. the Sierra Club and their foreign-backed affiliates), along comes another breathtaking attack. The Clubbers and their minions have filed a petition with the Bidenista-controlled EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), asking the EPA to classify natural gas and fuel oil furnaces throughout the country as a “Source Category” subject to emissions rules under the federal Clean Air Act, which is a clever way of saying the sale of new fossil energy furnaces used in homes and businesses should be banned on the assumption they cause pollution that violates the Clean Air Act.
If you live in Pennsylvania and listen to (or read) the media at all, you have likely heard about Senate Bill 106. The “short title” for the bill is this: “A Joint Resolution proposing separate and distinct amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, providing that there is no constitutional right to taxpayer-funded abortion or other right relating to abortion; further providing for action on concurrent orders and resolutions, for Lieutenant Governor and for qualifications of electors; and providing for election audits.” Yeah, not so short. The bill is aimed at amending the PA Constitution to cover several important issues.
The Freeport LNG export facility, located in Quintana Island, Texas, has been offline since June due to an explosion and fire. Liquefying just over 2 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas, including some Marcellus/Utica gas, Freeport is the second largest LNG exporter in the country. Three weeks ago, Freeport announced the plant would be mostly back online and producing 2 Bcf/d sometime in October (see 
Revenue, free cash flow, and even profitability for Marcellus/Utica drillers (in fact, pretty much all oil and gas drillers) were through the roof in the second quarter of 2022. Rising oil prices and surging natural gas realizations drove per-unit revenues to a 15-year high. Almost all of the extra money coming in went to the bottom line. What about the third quarter that we’re now in? RBN Energy reports “clouds are emerging on the horizon for U.S. E&Ps in the third quarter.” What clouds?
The number one source of electric generation in the United States is natural gas. Contrary to renewables zealots who blabber on about how wind and solar are taking over in generating electricity, the reality is far different. Natural gas, and coal, and even oil (i.e. fossil fuels) continue to be THE dominant source of fuel to generate electricity. Natgas has been and remains #1, king of the hill. And natgas’ role GREW in July, according to the Biden-controlled U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The recently-adopted Manchin-Schumer so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is a toned-down version of the Build Back Better/Green New Deal proposal of last year, is supposed to save Mom Earth from toasting to death. That’s what all the Big Green groups and Democrat politicians say. You could hear a collective sigh of relief that Joe Biden has saved the planet. The reality? When you plug the numbers into the United Nations climate model to measure the impact on global temperature by 2100, you find that the Manchin-Schumer bill, in the most optimistic scenario, will lower worldwide temperatures by 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit. In other words, it doesn’t lower temps AT ALL. What the new law does do is transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to corporate Democrat cronies in the renewable sector. It’s sickening.